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A time came when, from the failure of sight, he must desist from his literary labours: his Marquesan hymns, grammars, and dictionaries; his scientific papers, lives of saints, and devotional poetry. He cast about for a new interest: pitched on gardening, and was to be seen all day, with spade and water-pot, in his childlike eagerness, actually running between the borders.
"Nobody does." "Nobody!" she exclaimed. "How do the grammars and history-books come to be written then?" In talking to me, somehow, the child always put on a more childish tone than when she talked to anyone else. I am certain there was no affection in it, though. Indeed, how could she be affected with her fault-finding old father? "No.
Some few novels, mostly French, live with the plays and songs; and Latin, French, German, Italian, Welsh, Spanish, and English grammars and dictionaries take up their abode in every available corner. A quantity of fishing tackle and a gun are thrown upon the window seat, and an embroidered waistcoat, blue satin cravat, and a pair of yellow kid gloves lie on an unoccupied chair.
What I knew of ancient story was gathered from Salmon's and Guthrie's Geographical Grammars; and the ideas I had formed of modern manners, of literature, and criticism, I got from the Spectator.
It was piteous to discover how much time the poor forlorn little girl had spent sitting on the floor in the loft, poring over old grammars, and phrase-books, and translations of missionary or government school-books there accumulated anything that related to India, or that seemed to carry on what she had done with Edmund: and she had acquired just enough to give her a keen appetite for all the higher class of lore, which she knew to reside in the unapproachable study.
Thomas Rolph thus refers to the state of schools two years later: "It is really melancholy to traverse the Province and go into many of the common schools; you find a brood of children, instructed by some Anti-British adventurer, instilling into the young and tender mind sentiments hostile to the parent State; false accounts of the late war in which Great Britain was engaged with the United States; geography setting forth New York, Philadelphia, Boston, &c., as the largest and finest cities in the world; historical reading books describing the American population as the most free and enlightened under heaven, insisting on the superiority of their laws and institutions to those of all the world, in defiance of the agrarian outrages and mob supremacy daily witnessed and lamented; and American spelling books, dictionaries, and grammars, teaching them an Anti-British dialect and idiom, although living in a British Province and being subjects to the British Crown."
Her earlier ones, for the most part, were written at the corner of a large table, covered with the usual heaps of "after-lessons," in a school-room, where some twenty enfranchised girls were putting away copybooks, French grammars, etc., and getting out play-boxes and fancy-work, with the common amount of chatter and noise.
A proof of the latter occurred when, with his quick-witted wife, he was occupied in conning over the Italian and Modern Greek Grammars, in preparation for their journey to the Ionian Islands. The difference in their natural capacities in this respect is shown in her playful expression; "I got my lesson in half an hour; while John has been three or four hours over his, and does not know it yet."
"Then, indeed, Annie, you do not know in your own head, or you could explain, so that I might know in my own head." And so a healthy habit was fostered of clearness of thought and of expression. The Latin grammar was used because it was more perfect than the modern grammars, and served as a solid foundation for modern languages.
This work is entitled, we think, to rank with the best grammars of the Greek language that have appeared in German or English, in all the points that constitute grammatical excellence; while its monographic character justified and required an exhaustive treatment of its particular topic, not to be found even in the huge grammars of Matthiæ and Kühner.
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